“Territories” is a universally understandable term, relatable to both humans and non-humans; it can be understood by those without a technical background, and yet it is relatable to a range of technical and academic concepts. In the humanities, for instance, territories may be considered — as in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari — in terms of the structure and organization of power, most obviously within nation-states.¹ In politics, territories have always played a central role, given the tribal and geographically possessive traits of our species.² In biology, territories can be related to ecologies and ecosystems. In critical zone science, territories can be related to the nature and intensity of biogeochemical processes. However, in the Anthropocene — that de facto (if still informal) geological epoch kick-started by the extraordinary mid-twentieth century “Great Acceleration” of population, industrialization, and globalization — territories may be seen from yet different perspectives.³

In geology, territories can be described by the “outcrop” (geographic extent) and “facies” (characteristics) of the geological materials that make up Earth’s surface, like a sandstone formation or a body of metamorphic rock. Territory in this sense has an underlying three-dimensional structure, which (depending on the kind of outcrop) may be more or less inferred from its surface form. It has a specific chemical and mineralogical composition, which may range from homogenous to highly heterogenous, and a history of its formation, which may range from virtually instantaneous (as for a volcanic ash layer) to a span of millions of years (as for bodies of metamorphic rock at the roots of mountain belts).

Geological territories also continuously interact with the atmosphere (via climate-related weathering), with the hydrosphere (with various degrees of saturation by water), and with the biosphere, as plants, animals, and microbes colonize the outcrop surface. Today, these interactions overwhelmingly include those with humans and human societies, as we colonize and interact with various geological outcrops (as with river floodplains, which are convenient to build on but also prone to flood risks), and construct others (as with highly urbanized areas). The outcrops/territories of city-strata have developed enormously in the Anthropocene and continue to grow. Cities are the most eye-catching feature of the growth of the technosphere: Earth’s newest “sphere" that encompasses all of its technological systems and the human institutions caught up in them.⁴ The technosphere, an outgrowth of—and now parasite on—the biosphere, weighs more than the rest of all living things on this planet.⁵ And that is just the functional parts: waste has a mass more than an order of magnitude greater.⁶

The Anthropocene is witness to the establishment of new kinds of territories. Some, like the modern concrete-dominated “megacity facies,” were consciously built to house many hundreds of millions of humans on Earth. Others, like the oxygen-depleted “dead zones” spreading across seas and lakes, are unplanned consequences of our reengineering of Earth’s surfaces. Anthropocene territories can be created both intentionally and, increasingly, unintentionally. Exploring Anthropocene territories involves identifying them; tracing their extent; characterizing their physical, chemical, and biological nature and dynamics; measuring their rate of growth; exploring what kind of geology and stratigraphic patterns they create; and so on. This has parallels in how geologists identify particular rock-based entities, like stratal units, igneous plutons, and such, and determine their history, properties, and relations. Traditionally, much of this effort has been—and continues to be—simultaneously curiosity-driven and directly or indirectly aimed at exploiting the uses of these rock units, whether as fossil fuels, mineral ores, or for the groundwater they contain. Increasingly, however, geologists analyze how these rock units interact with climate and life. Aspects of this classically geological perspective may have wider uses that extend to the humanities-based or multidisciplinary study of Anthropocene processes. In what follows, we sketch out a few examples of new and emerging Anthropocene territories.

Coral reef areas are now widely in transition, as corals are being killed worldwide, mostly by marine heat waves that have led to mass coral bleaching events. First recorded in the 1980s, these have since intensified to the point that “most coral in the world is now dead.”⁷ Reef areas are now being overgrown by more heat-resistant organisms, such as green algae (seaweeds), which are transforming their ecology and sharply diminishing their crucial biodiversity. It is also physically changing their structure by reducing or halting the production of the coral skeletons that form the architecture—the coral rock mass—of the reef structure. This simultaneously makes reefs less effective as storm barriers and reduces their ability to grow upwards to adjust to a rising sea level. Given that global temperatures will almost certainly rise further, this transformation will continue to a new, different, more-or-less stable state, one that is made of very different biological components.

The new global territory (or territories, for a range of replacement ecologies will likely develop) that will result from reef transformation will cover much or all of the approximately 350,000 square kilometers that reefs currently occupy. The rapid, ongoing loss of these biodiverse sea ecologies also has huge implications for the human communities that live on and around them. Which organisms will take over the main ecological functions of the reef, as keystone species and as the solid structure that provides so many habitats for other life? And how will those functions change? Will the new ecological assemblages still include major skeleton-bearing organisms to replace the rock-producing function of corals, like the bizarre tube-shaped rudist mollusks that built reefs in late Cretaceous, some 100 million years ago, when tropical seas grew too hot for corals? Or will they include the giant Nummulites foraminifera (skeleton-making amoeba-like organisms) that became rock-builders following the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 55 million years ago, when coral populations collapsed? As this new territory emerges, focus will change from trying to prevent reef loss (for that may well be a battle that has already been lost), to understanding, coming to terms with, and living through the aftermath.

Shallow, low-lying coastal areas, such as deltas and coastal plains, built outwards during the Holocene, when global sea level over the three millennia prior to industrialization varied by little more than 0.1 meter.⁸  Hence, their surfaces are now at or just above sea level — or substantially below, as human-driven ground subsidence, such as pumping water and/or hydrocarbons, is in many places happening at a faster pace than sea level rise. These territories now support large human populations and include major cities such as New Orleans, Shanghai, Amsterdam, and Jakarta.⁹ As sea levels rise, these cities are in the early stages of inundation, perhaps most visibly in Jakarta. At least two meters of sea level rise now seems certain within the next few (likely very few) centuries, which would flood approximately 455,000 square kilometers of land, with approximately 359,000 square kilometers lost in the first meter of rise,¹⁰ including the surfaces of most of the world’s great deltas.¹¹ This may happen as soon as the end of this century.¹²

A new kind of territory is virtually certain to emerge in the form of a complex, highly engineered, and heterogenous infrastructure of permanently submerged urban areas. This territory will not simply represent urban loss: it will be a highly dynamic environment—physically, chemically, and biologically—as it interacts with the energetic processes of the coastal zone. It will interact with human communities, too, amid developing patterns of abandonment: of relict populations, of which parts of cities may be salvaged and which are simply left, of what use may be made of this newly submerged zone, of what new hazards might emerge within it, and of what legal and political battles may be fought over it. The “water city” of Lagos may give an idea of one possible trajectory.¹³

The “dead zones” of coastal shallow seas, such as the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, are also essentially Anthropocene phenomena. The result of nitrogen and phosphorus over-fertilization, they now extend over some 250,000 square kilometers. This form of territory extends onto land, with eutrophic conditions spreading among lakes globally. These kinds of territories may represent, in some ways, a return to conditions of deep geological time, when anoxic conditions extended over large areas of the sea floor (mainly in hot “greenhouse” times of Earth history). But there were few analogues of these ancient anoxic seas in the Holocene, when human civilization, and human exploitation of the sea, developed.¹⁴ Similar, and more extensive — yet less easily defined — territories are emerging as ocean water masses expand in response to anthropogenic warming and create low-oxygen regions of the seas. Already detectable, these growing areas will limit the living space for plankton, fish, and marine mammals, and therefore restrict the world’s already over-exploited fisheries.

Lakes have an importance that is disproportionate to their volume. The approximately 180,000 cubic kilometers of water they contain is a tiny proportion of the hydrosphere: the oceans contain some 7,000 times more. But lakes are shallower than the sea, which means their water is thinly spread. Lake surface area is therefore only a little less than one hundredth of the surface area of ocean water. Lakes are also split into myriad separate water bodies, which means their total shoreline length exceeds the marine coastline some six-fold.¹⁵ A fundamental part of the terrestrial environment and of human societies, their close and intricate ties to the lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere—as well as to the cryosphere (in high-latitude and mountainous regions) and the technosphere (given their vulnerability to industrial pollution and warming)—means that lakes are more immediate sentinels of environmental change than the deep oceans.¹⁶ 

Palaeolimnological (lake floor sediment) records have long registered changes caused by local human communities. The sediment record of Crawford Lake in Ontario, for instance, clearly shows impacts from the native Iroquois population that lived there several centuries ago. Such traces, stretching back millennia, are widely distributed in time and space across the world. But, for the most part, the Iroquois did not change the fundamental character of the lakes, nor did they change the way in which lakes could be understood as territories for their resident and surrounding human and non-human populations. In a meta-analysis of seventy-two lakes worldwide, these older ecological shifts were climate-related, rather than anthropogenically-caused. The pattern of asynchronous, disparate ecological shifts changed in the 1950s to one of larger, synchronous changes associated with both climate and anthropogenic drivers.¹⁷

The direct impacts of the Anthropocene on lakes include: the steep rise in nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer use, which contributes to widespread eutrophication; the steep rise in the number of large dams, which creates new, artificial lakes; the explosive growth and use of novel materials such as plastics and persistent organic pollutants; the warming of lakes as global temperatures rise; and the marked increase in non-native species over the last seventy years, which has transformed biogeographic patterns of lake fish populations.¹⁸ All these processes — and more — have led to transformations in the physical, chemical, and, most importantly, biological characters of lakes worldwide.¹⁹ 

A recent assessment of lakes in the Anthropocene describes them in terms usually reserved for human health, from their  “thermal, circulatory, respiratory, nutritional and metabolic issues to infections and poisoning.”²⁰ It also looks at widespread lake drying, of which the most striking example from the Anthropocene is the Aral Sea. It is undeniable that the nature of lakes is changing in the Anthropocene, turning them into another kind of territory.

These are just a few examples of the emerging new territories of the Anthropocene. There are many more. Even un-submerged contemporary cities with their steel-and-concrete construction differ markedly from their smaller and mineralogically distinct Holocene precursors, and therefore are a new (if now familiar) Anthropocene territory—as are the waste-plastics-enriched territories of the landfill sites that surround them. 

Geologically, these sites represent highly distinctive outcrops and facies, and so can be analyzed within the technical frame of classical chronostratigraphy. Thus, they have a geometry and thickness (even if they possess much more hollow space than the average rock mass), and a chemical and mineralogical composition that is, in many ways, far more diverse and heterogenous than those of classical rock strata. This kind of geometric approach to estimating the physical mass of technospheric components complements approaches based on the evaluation of material flows. Indeed, the technosphere’s waste products outweigh their functional mass by an order of magnitude.

Emerging Anthropocene territories are dynamic, too. They are subject to weathering and erosion—especially bio-erosion, as cities are torn down during redevelopment and through warfare. They also rest unconformably (i.e., with an enormous time gap) on older strata. The nature of this unconformity (i.e., with or without an intervening layer of anthropogenic rubble) controls the exchange of fluids and chemical components between them, and determines physical factors such as subsidence. 

These new planetary territories are expanding rapidly. Their significance is extensive, and in many directions, for both their human and non-human inhabitants. We should collectively work to try to bring them into proper focus.